Cropel

Recovering data from a hard disk that’s been mechanically damaged is a rather difficult task; this is what the developers of ReclaiMe, a simple data recovery tool, uncovered. The thing is that it doesn’t have to get to this; it doesn’t have to get to the point where recovering data off a mechanically damaged disk is next to impossible. By reading S.M.A.R.T. (Self Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) data, the mechanical failure of a hard disk can be predicted. And so the team behind ReclaiMe (Anton A. Minyailo, Elena and Julia Y. Pakhomova) came up with the Cropel application. This tool reads S.M.A.R.T. data and predicts disk failures.

The size of the Cropel installation file doesn’t even go up to 1MB, it’s less than that – and that’s a good thing. It means that the download will complete in a blink, even if you’re on a terrible internet connection. The same can be said about installing the application (it can be installed on top of XP, Vista, and Windows 7). Just click through the simple setup wizard and in little time you will have Cropel up and running.

When Cropel runs, there’s an icon in the system tray. Left click it to bring up the application’s interface, right click it to access the “Open Cropel” and “Stop& Exit” options. The interface displays your disk or disks and it has these big buttons at the top. Next to each disk you will see its status and failure prediction. For my Western Digital HDD it said “OK” under “Status” and “No Problem” under Failure Prediction. There’s a bit of green text in the left hand corner of the application – it said “1 device OK.”

To access more info about a disk, select it from the list and hit the blue button that says “More” on it. A new pane will show up and display things like spin-up time, read error rate, seek error rate, and more. A failure prediction is presented to each parameter displayed in the list.

You have a limited amount of time to use Cropel for free and assess the functionality it has to offer. Or to put it in other words, the application is free to try for 10 days only.

Prevent HDD crashes – get Cropel S.M.A.R.T monitoring software to predict failures.